• shalafi@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    Some might be surprised how many systems are still running on AS400s. IBM still makes and maintains IBMi, the modern iteration. My last company wrote our flagship product for these machines, all green screen. Our customers would sometimes move to our GUI product and jump right back to the prompt menus. Hey, if you gotta move fast and have a bulletproof system, text menus are the only way to fly!

    By my god, the skill set for running and programming those beasts touches on almost nothing I’ve learned in 30+ years of IT work. Wish I had got experience in that part of the company, seen some solid job posts for that sorta tech.

    • spongebue@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      I worked in the airline industry for years and learned a GUI overlay for one system and another entirely green screen system called SHARES (see if you can guess the airline). Honestly I kind of enjoyed working with those systems; there’s some refreshing “back to basics” feeling kind of like driving a manual transmission.

      In my current job I’ve been using another legacy system. Well, my job was to create a relatively modern service for the legacy system to call, but none of the remaining developers knew how to use the extensions of that system that does SOAP calls. So I had to learn just enough of that legacy system to hold their hands through the parts that call my service. Kind of fun, to be honest!

    • tjsauce@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      I worked with an AS400 while in vehicle logistics, those things are optimized for simple functions but high data throughput